Ownership Verified: Cpt.70's NotAHonda - 1983 Triumph Acclaim L

With the Acclaim's MOT due on the 21st and it performing sterling service as my daily driver I took it over to a fellow crap car hoarder's place to get some welding and underbody tidying up done:

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The result was as thus:

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Not the prettiest of repairs but solid enough for a daily run around. While the car was up on a ramp I also took a wire wheel to the sills and jacking points to remove any loose underseal/rust had a poke around and found everything was fairly solid lathered everything in Vactan rust converter and applied some fresh underseal. Then I tightened all the exhaust joins to no avail and resorted to simply plastering every join in paste which stopped the many, many leaks. I then stick welded a patch into the NSR inner wheel arch, which was looking very crispy, the day before the MOT.

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I took it round to the garage fairly confident that the only thing it'd fail on was a leaky rear shock and possibly some odd electrical gremlins...

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Well fuck. Either the last few MOT testers were slightly less vigilant, that was a rough 1000 miles or my MOT tester was in a really bad mood. My tester had probed every nook and cranny with vigour and created a variety of small holes, he must have been prodding pretty bloody hard as well 'cause he managed to put holes in metal I'd welded to... To say I was gutted was an understatement, especially given how the car is spot on mechanically.

The Acclaim is now sat at the garage waiting for a new shock absorber to arrive and be fitted (and the inexplicably backwards fitted tyre to be corrected). Then it is going back to the unit where the chassis leg was welded for more metalwork.

The repair bill quoted by the garage was £880, £30 more than I actually paid for the car. Needless to say it'll be getting repaired for a fraction of that partially because I can't afford it and partially because it's not worth it. Hoping to have back on the road in a fortnight or so but it's bloody annoying, I knew there were bits of bodywork needing to be done but I was expecting to be able spread them out over summer at my leisure, hate rushing for MOTs...
With the Acclaim at the garage I took the Dolomite home for tinkering as it'd been sat there for two months waiting for them to look at the rear drums and I was tired of the lack of progress...
 
I've read your hoarder friend's thread over on retrorides and he's got a great ever changing fleet! You're not on there, are you?

Good luck with getting the mot!
 
Started poking the rust, was a bad time. 13 hours of welding worth of a bad time...

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Oh well, I needed to learn to weld with a MIG anyway and am lucky enough to have friends with the equipment for the job. I arrived at the unit at around 11:30am on Friday, I left at 1am on Saturday, it was a long and shitty day but it didn't cost me £45 an hour... I also left my huge sheet of 1.2mm mild steel in the back of the Rover and didn't realise until I was nearly there after an hour of driving. Luckily the fella kind enough to lend me the use of his equipment also had half a Lada floorpan lying around after having cut some bits out for his car so I used that.

I also confirmed the car has been resprayed in a similar shade of blue to the original but not exactly. It is in fact Mercedes Steel Blue, a colour they use for their commercial range! I now consider this a truly multicultural vehicle being a Japanese design, built in Britain, repaired using Russian steel and painted in a German colour...

It's booked in for another MOT on Friday, which it should now pass!
 
Hi . The green dolly is my old car. Bought from a fella in Coventry and then sold it to a bloke in Newcastle
 
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Weldathon paid off, car is on the road for another year! The MOT tester said it was pretty much as perfect as one could expect of a car of that age in the mechanical dept and that although it'd obviously seen plenty of welding it was all done to a good standard.

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Cheers!

It's rusty in "the usual places".

There are some fairly poor welding repairs done in the past which have come back to haunt the car, it doesn't seem that they were rust proofed at all after being done... Everything is now patched up well enough for an MOT but I'll have to re-do a few bits in the future to a higher standard if I want it to last/look nice. Hopefully I'll be able to take it back to the unit and spend a bit more time on fabricating nice repairs without only having a single day to carry out the work!

The leading edges of the rear wheel arches are entirely crafted out of filler, I knew there was some bodge there but I wasn't expecting quite so much...

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Rear arch repair panels for these cars are made of unobtanium although I'm told that front wings can be cut to fit and that Mk1 Fiesta arches might also work... I had neither to hand so having cut out enough to get at the inner arch/rear end of the sill I decided to not go any further up! I added in some metal in vaguely the correct shape and liberal application of filler has seen it look vaguely presentable although I got bored of sanding very quickly so it's quite lumpy... The inner arch was also wafer thin at the bottom front and all the way up the back so was cut out and replaced.

I'm not sure how far I want to go with this car. It's got a few more years left in it yet with annual MOT patching but I suspect properly restoring it would spiral out of control very quickly.
 
I've been getting my money's worth out of this car... 800 miles over 12 days taking me up north to a meeting of like minded crap car enthusiasts, over to visit my parents, then to see a mate nearby for a couple of days, back down south and then away on holiday to the west coast with my girlfriend.

So first I went up to Shitefest, the annual meetup for members of the Autoshite forum. It changes venue every year and this one was over near Aberdeen, only 120 miles away so it'd be rude not to visit.


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After a weekend of camping and eating little other than food fried on a paraffin stove I headed further west to visit my parents over near Strathdon, then headed further north to visit the Renault hoarding chap I gave my Dolomite 1850HL to:

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Then, as I was local, I took the car back to it's original dealership:

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Then I went back to my parents for a bit, bid them farewell and heading back south over the Cairngorm mountains:

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Then me and my girlfriend went to Argyll on holiday for a long weekend:

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With that over and done with I've just ordered a load of parts and will be giving the car a comprehensive service.
 
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If that thing ever makes it to Ringmeet under its own power I'll give myself a Currywurst Energy Drink enema.

:tease:

Also what is this "girlfriend" of which you speak?

:threadnopics:
 
...was that a DIESEL Delta 88?

also

MWF;n3550695 said:
If that thing ever makes it to Ringmeet under its own power I'll give myself a Currywurst Energy Drink enema.

You realize of course, this means it actually will make it now that you said that, yes?
 
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MWF;n3550695 said:
If that thing ever makes it to Ringmeet under its own power I'll give myself a Currywurst Energy Drink enema.

:tease:

Also what is this "girlfriend" of which you speak?

:threadnopics:

1.3 Honda engine, shipped in pre-built from Nippon. Fucking thing will drive to the moon and back. :p Having said that my 1.6 Civic is comprehensively fucked and has been sitting outside my flat on axle stands for several months now due everything around the engine steadily failing...

The girlfriend is old news, man. We've been going out for nearly a year, I think there is a five whole pictures of us together and naturally she hates all of them...

Also, yes that is a DIESEL, Olds. The fantastic V8 which was so awful it effectively killed the market for diesel cars in the USA almost singlehandedly. People on Autoshite take buying bad cars very seriously. The green Wartburg 1.3 is actually still stuck there because it destroyed it's gearbox/halfshafts somewhere near Dundee and although it limped itself to it's destination it'll not be making it back to England without a trailer...
 
Dude. I'm chuffed to bits you've found happiness of a kind.

Ringmeet 2019? You bring the Acclaim and I'll supply the funnel.
 
captain_70s;n3550730 said:
Also, yes that is a DIESEL, Olds. The fantastic V8 which was so awful it effectively killed the market for diesel cars in the USA almost singlehandedly. People on Autoshite take buying bad cars very seriously. The green Wartburg 1.3 is actually still stuck there because it destroyed it's gearbox/halfshafts somewhere near Dundee and although it limped itself to it's destination it'll not be making it back to England without a trailer...

Oh lord....it's awful! I thought that those diesel engines had all died!
 
I've done several thousand miles in this thing now, has a few issues still:

The exhaust is garbage, I really want to replace it but lack of funds dictates it stays and I live with it sounding like a damp metallic fart all the time.
The idle is really lumpy. I think the carbs are balanced alright, can't find any vacuum leaks. I need to do the valve clearances next.
There are several bird shit stains in the paint that won't polish out.
The MW/LW radio was driving me mad, I changed this today in preparation for my 3 hour drive North on Friday...


Seemed like the tape head doesn't always line up with the tape correctly, jabbing the eject button seems to "fix" this issue.

[video=youtube;_UisEu-2OZo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UisEu-2OZo[/video]

I did pull the thing apart and try to find the adjusting screws to no avail, we'll see how it copes with Glasgow's dismal road surfaces on my commute to work tomorrow.
 
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